Monday, October 27, 2008
If ever there was a good time to upgrade your CV with training...
IT workers in the city are beginning the annual job of updating their CV early this year, who can blame them. 360is has negotiated a 10% discount from training partner vTrain for students quoting reference 360NOV. vTrain offer short, sharp certified courses for virtualization technologists covering Citrix Xen, VMWare, and Microsoft Hyper-V, based either at your own premises or their dedicated classrooms.
Monday, October 20, 2008
360is Security Seminar, The Insider Threat
360is Principal Consultant, Nick Hutton, is a guest speaker at a breakfast briefing at the Royal Society for the Appreciation of Arts, London on Wednesday October 22nd 2008. The subject for the briefing is "The Insider Threat" and the event will be attended by CSOs and IT managers. Also speaking at the event:
Geoff Harris, President of the Information Systems Security Association in the UK
Damir Rajnovic, PSIRT Incident Manager, Cisco Systems
Presentation start at 9am sharp, find us on the map. If you would like to attend this free seminar, please contact us.
Geoff Harris, President of the Information Systems Security Association in the UK
Damir Rajnovic, PSIRT Incident Manager, Cisco Systems
Presentation start at 9am sharp, find us on the map. If you would like to attend this free seminar, please contact us.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
SteelEye Certified on 360is v1624 Appliance
SteelEye's Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer is now certified for mission critical use on the 360is v1624 virtualization hardware appliance. SteelEye joins VMWare and Citrix XenServer as the 3rd software vendor to achieve this certification on the v1624 hardware appliance.
The certification allows SteelEye, Citrix, and VMWare customers to benefit from higher uptime and faster Disaster Recovery through the use of a solid state, diskless, hardware appliance, optimised for running high performance virtual machines at superior densities than current conventional server platforms. The SteelEye software can also be retro-fitted to customers existing XenServer installations and can replicate non-virtualized servers to VMs.
SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer is based on the proven SteelEye Data Replication product and runs within the XenServer Console OS (Dom 0) and provides highly optimized replication of XenServer VMs across any LAN or WAN network connection. Any or all VMs replicated in real-time to a target server are then available to be brought into service as needed for business continuity.
The certification allows SteelEye, Citrix, and VMWare customers to benefit from higher uptime and faster Disaster Recovery through the use of a solid state, diskless, hardware appliance, optimised for running high performance virtual machines at superior densities than current conventional server platforms. The SteelEye software can also be retro-fitted to customers existing XenServer installations and can replicate non-virtualized servers to VMs.
SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer is based on the proven SteelEye Data Replication product and runs within the XenServer Console OS (Dom 0) and provides highly optimized replication of XenServer VMs across any LAN or WAN network connection. Any or all VMs replicated in real-time to a target server are then available to be brought into service as needed for business continuity.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Out of Chaos, Opportunity
The cost of provisioning a server or desktop has collapsed thanks to virtualization, thin client, multicore CPUs and ubiquitous gigabit networking in the data centre. Indeed, in the last 3 years virtualization software itself has tumbled in price from thousands of dollars per unit and is now given away for free with many Operating Systems.
So what happens when server hardware reaches true commodity pricing levels? What happens when the necessity for new capital equipment expenditure goes away, and the power to spawn whole IT estates ends up in the hands of business units or end users? Virtual system instances surge to meet demand (no bad thing) but the CIO and his team are left responsible for reliability, security, and compliance of an uncontrollable virtual estate. Not all organisations have a powerful CIO or IT function, not everyone is able to effectively enforce central policy on such a fluid infrastructure.
Early adopters of virtualization have already found this out the hard way, and are now trying to cope with this uncontrolled growth in the number of virtual systems.
We have been here before. During the 90's the cost per megabyte of hard drive storage (remember when we used to think about storage in terms of megabytes?) plummeted. Storage proliferated in the data centre, on the desktop, and in a hundred types of portable devices. The struggle to manage this storage still rages today. Do you know where your confidential data is? Perhaps it's on the SAN, and on John's desktop PC, or his laptop, you know, the one he lost on the train. We waited more than 10 years for tools to help us manage this uncontrolled growth in storage. Even now with data de-duplication, filesystem snapshots, disk encryption, and (somewhat) affordable SAN and NAS, managing storage is a daily struggle with huge associated costs.
Common sense tells us that it is better to fix problems now, before they become chronic. How much easier would it have been to manage today's terabytes of storage if all those powerful tools were available to us in 1990?
How can we take the lessons learned from storage and apply them to today's problem of virtualization sprawl?
What if you could devolve the power to create, destroy, and hibernate virtual machines to your authorized users in a carefully controlled way? What if virtual machines were automatically decommission after a projects pre-determined end-date? What if you could report on and produce billing records for virtual machines according to their consumption of physical resources?
If you could do all these things today, how would that help you manage virtual server sprawl now and in the future? How much time would it save, and what would all that be worth to you?
For more than a year 360is have been working with a group of experienced virtualization practitioners at one of our clients, who have recently spun-out a software company, and are taking just such a Virtual Resource Management platform to market. DynamicOps announced the launch of VRM in June and based upon its maturity in production environments are already welcoming new users. We recommend it for medium and large organizations looking to rein in existing virtualization sprawl or stop the problem before it starts. Vendor neutral, multi-platform, and security conscious, DynamicOps and 360is are planning an autumn seminar in the heart of London's financial centre to introduce VRM and and explore how it allows you to re-gain control of your (virtual) IT estate.
If you would like to be invited, please get in touch.
So what happens when server hardware reaches true commodity pricing levels? What happens when the necessity for new capital equipment expenditure goes away, and the power to spawn whole IT estates ends up in the hands of business units or end users? Virtual system instances surge to meet demand (no bad thing) but the CIO and his team are left responsible for reliability, security, and compliance of an uncontrollable virtual estate. Not all organisations have a powerful CIO or IT function, not everyone is able to effectively enforce central policy on such a fluid infrastructure.
Early adopters of virtualization have already found this out the hard way, and are now trying to cope with this uncontrolled growth in the number of virtual systems.
We have been here before. During the 90's the cost per megabyte of hard drive storage (remember when we used to think about storage in terms of megabytes?) plummeted. Storage proliferated in the data centre, on the desktop, and in a hundred types of portable devices. The struggle to manage this storage still rages today. Do you know where your confidential data is? Perhaps it's on the SAN, and on John's desktop PC, or his laptop, you know, the one he lost on the train. We waited more than 10 years for tools to help us manage this uncontrolled growth in storage. Even now with data de-duplication, filesystem snapshots, disk encryption, and (somewhat) affordable SAN and NAS, managing storage is a daily struggle with huge associated costs.
Common sense tells us that it is better to fix problems now, before they become chronic. How much easier would it have been to manage today's terabytes of storage if all those powerful tools were available to us in 1990?
How can we take the lessons learned from storage and apply them to today's problem of virtualization sprawl?
What if you could devolve the power to create, destroy, and hibernate virtual machines to your authorized users in a carefully controlled way? What if virtual machines were automatically decommission after a projects pre-determined end-date? What if you could report on and produce billing records for virtual machines according to their consumption of physical resources?
If you could do all these things today, how would that help you manage virtual server sprawl now and in the future? How much time would it save, and what would all that be worth to you?
For more than a year 360is have been working with a group of experienced virtualization practitioners at one of our clients, who have recently spun-out a software company, and are taking just such a Virtual Resource Management platform to market. DynamicOps announced the launch of VRM in June and based upon its maturity in production environments are already welcoming new users. We recommend it for medium and large organizations looking to rein in existing virtualization sprawl or stop the problem before it starts. Vendor neutral, multi-platform, and security conscious, DynamicOps and 360is are planning an autumn seminar in the heart of London's financial centre to introduce VRM and and explore how it allows you to re-gain control of your (virtual) IT estate.
If you would like to be invited, please get in touch.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Seminar: Mission Critical Virtualization
360is is running an invitation only seminar on the 21st July at Chalfont Park, Chalfont St. Peter, Bucks. The theme is mission critical and production systems virtualization. If you are an existing customer then you should have already been contacted, however there will be a few extra places available. The agenda includes a preview of Citrix Xen v4.2, disaster recovery and business continuity using virtualization, a guest speaker from SteelEye Technology, and one of our own case studies. The whole event lasts less than 3 hours and attendees will also have the chance to win a presentation case of champagne.
Please contact Rob Gilson by Email if you would like to come along, or call us on the main number leaving your full contact details.
--- Update 6pm 21st July
Thanks to everyone for making the seminar a success, we will be in-touch shortly with each of you. Congratulations to Alex of Netui who won the prize draw, and thanks to Citrix for the use of the venue, catering, and staff.
--- Update 6pm 23rd July
It looks like our virtualization hardware appliance made a good impression, Rupert over at Virtualisation Tribulations had some kind things to say about our latest product and the seminar. UK virtualization blogs (or technology blogs of any sort!) are rare, so be sure to check it out for an insiders view on Citrix, Xen, VMWare, and the industry.
Please contact Rob Gilson by Email if you would like to come along, or call us on the main number leaving your full contact details.
--- Update 6pm 21st July
Thanks to everyone for making the seminar a success, we will be in-touch shortly with each of you. Congratulations to Alex of Netui who won the prize draw, and thanks to Citrix for the use of the venue, catering, and staff.
--- Update 6pm 23rd July
It looks like our virtualization hardware appliance made a good impression, Rupert over at Virtualisation Tribulations had some kind things to say about our latest product and the seminar. UK virtualization blogs (or technology blogs of any sort!) are rare, so be sure to check it out for an insiders view on Citrix, Xen, VMWare, and the industry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
